Cloud computing and mobility are the two major pillars on which Indian SMBs’ ICT adoption rests. Their combined wallet share is likely to rise from just above 30% in 2013 to almost 45% within the next five years. Specifically within the mobile devices segment, SMB tablet shipments are likely to show as high as over 50% growth next year. These findings have emerged from the 2014 India SMB ICT & Cloud Services Tracker Overview study by New York-based AMI-Partners.
“Mobility-related investments have emerged as key fast-growing areas in terms of ICT deployment and investments, driven by the spiraling rise in tablet and smartphone shipments as well as a significant increase in data plan spending by India SMBs. The combined tablet and smartphone shipments to SMBs have already outpaced traditional PC shipments (the latter now makes up only 45% of the hardware shipment pie). In the next five years, the share of tablets and smartphones is anticipated to escalate to 70%, as the contribution of PCs gradually drops further.
AMI’s India SMB study underscores an interesting trend: In many technology areas the share of hosted/cloud components expenditure is predicted to rise at the expense of on-premise solutions. The growing usage of hosted servers clearly illustrates this point. “Hosted servers are making significant in-roads, and hence the share of on-premise server spending is gradually on the decline,” said Dev Chakravarty, Research Manager at AMI India.
“More and more SMBs prefer hosted servers and co-location since this yields multiple benefits – that is, lower costs, fewer management hassles, no need to maintain a datacenter, all-the-time 3rd party support, assured security measures, etc.” Other specific examples that highlight the drop in on-premise spending components are the rise in share of SaaS software at the expense of on-premise software and also an escalation in remote managed IT services (RMITS) components’ share vis-à-vis a drop in the on-premise service and support expenditure.
Security remains a high-priority, high-growth area within the India SMB spending portfolio. “For the major ICT spending categories among SMBs, security is a key technology that displays the highest future growth—more than 20% year on year. Within the last twelve months over 70% of India SMBs experienced some kind of security breach. Hence SMBs are now even more wary of security-related threats,” remarked Chakravarty.